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Researchers at MIT are manufacturing tiny artificial viruses out of biodegradeable polymers and injecting them into mice with tumors. The goal is to come up with a treatment for late stage ovarian cancer. And it just might work.
“We’re very excited. We can cure mice. We want to treat people but there are a lot of steps until we get there,” said Daniel Anderson, the lead researcher on the project.
The research is part of the growing field of nanotherapy, a research area that has the potential to create an arsenal of new cancer drugs that attack only the sick cells, leaving the healthy cells alone. It’s a revolution that could some day put an end to the 6 to 8 hours-long chemotherapy infusions, the hair loss and the nausea that are routine for many who battle cancer today.
Ovarian cancer is an elusive therapeutic target. Early detection is rare because the symptoms, like fatigue and abdominal pain, are common to many different illnesses. When a patient is diagnosed, the most common course of treatment is surgery to remove the tumor, followed by chemo. But the tumor often comes back.
Anderson’s treatment involves injecting a nanoparticle, made of an artificial virus and therapeutic DNA, directly into the patient’s peritoneal cavity, which houses organs including the liver, spleen and ovaries. Viruses are good at weaseling their way into cells, so they are a good way to deliver DNA or other therapies in a targeted way, directly into certain cells. But the immune system eventually figures out how to battle real viruses, so Anderson makes his from biodegradeable polymers. The nanoparticle delivers a gene that is engineered to kill cancer cells and leave others alone. Anderson said, “The ultimate goal is for the treatment to replace chemotherapy, but in the early stages we will look toward advancing the treatment as part of a combination therapy.”
A trio of Cambridge-based companies, Aura Biosciences Inc., BIND Biosciences Inc. and Cerulean Pharma Inc., are also working on nanotherapies that could potentially treat cancer and other diseases. Investors are bullish on the technology: Aura launched with $3.7 million from private investors in February, BIND has raised $18.5 million since 2006 and just last month Cerulean closed a Series B round of financing worth $10 million. There’s a good reason why — the market for nano-enabled drugs is expected to reach $26 billion by 2010, according to Cientifica Ltd., the London-based strategic consulting group.
Elisabet de los Pinos, CEO of Aura, said, “In the next eight to 10 years, I think we are going to see the old chemo fall away as it is replaced with newer, less toxic drugs.” Aura’s technology uses nanoparticles to deliver different drugs, including traditional chemotherapy and RNA interference therapy, into tumor cells to reduce toxicity by avoiding healthy tissue. Aura’s first disease target is pancreatic cancer, which is among the most deadly forms of the disease. Like ovarian cancer, it is often diagnosed late and is often unresponsive to chemotherapy.
De los Pinos said that currently the treatment of cancer patients follows the well-worn path of surgery, followed by radiation, and finally chemo, because chemo is so undesirable. In the future, she said new drugs will likely be administered first, as the most attractive treatment option. Those drugs may be in IV form, like traditional chemo, or they may be injections or pills. She sees a time when there will be a panel of drugs available and each patient will get a unique combination of the drugs that can best attack that patient’s disease.
MIT’s Anderson and his team are looking to partner with another academic institution to do a Phase 1 clinical trial for their ovarian cancer treatment in humans over the next year to two years. His team has also been in contact with potential corporate partners. The team would then file an Investigational New Drug application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is the first step in a long regulatory process.
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